Composers and Innovation at SXSW

It’s interesting to read in Forbes about Beck’s new album, which the indie pop star is releasing…wait for it…as a bunch of pieces of sheet music.

Forbes hails the singer-songwriter’s efforts as “a genius innovation that appeals to the user-generated generation.”

Beck is essentially imitating something that classical composers have been doing for hundreds of years. So to call his endeavors “innovative” is rather overstating things. He’s really just reinventing the wheel.

Beck’s reinvention, however, does provide great grist for the mill regarding a project that I’m currently working on under the auspices of VoiceBox, the weekly syndicated public radio series about the human voice which I host and produce.

VoiceBox has teamed up with Salon97, a very cool organization headed by violinist and classical music aficionado Cariwyl Hebert which creates listening parties, multimedia materials and other cool stuff for classical music fans in the Bay Area, to propose an exciting presentation all about composers and innovation for the South By South West Festival next Spring.

Our panel proposal, Bach to Business: Great Composers and Creativity, aims to explore how six great composers from diverse backgrounds approach the art of productivity and what we can learn from their habits. Beck isn’t Jean Sibelius or Henry Burleigh, but somehow I think he’ll figure into our discussion.

Please vote for our presentation topic by clicking on the “thumbs up” icon in the left nav of The SXSW Panel Picker Web Page. And feel free to share the link by hitting the Facebook and Twitter icon on the same page. If our proposal gets enough votes, it will make it onto the SXSW schedule. We need your help to make this happen. Thank you for taking the time to cast your vote!

Chloe Veltman

...is the Senior Arts Editor at KQED (www.kqed.org), one of the U.S.'s most prominent public media organizations. Chloe returns to the Bay Area following two years as Arts Editor at Colorado Public Radio (www.cpr.org), where she was tapped to launch and lead the state-wide public media organization's first ever multimedia culture bureau. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (2011-2012) and Humanities Center Fellow (2012-2013) at Stanford University, Chloe has contributed reporting and criticism to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BBC Classical Music Magazine, American Theatre Magazine, WQXR and many other media outlets. Chloe was also the host and executive producer of VoiceBox, a syndicated, weekly public radio and podcast series all about the art of the human voice (www.voicebox-media.org), which ran for four years between 2009 and 2013. Her study about the evolution of singing culture in the U.S. is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Check out Chloe's website at www.chloeveltman.com and connect with her on Twitter via @chloeveltman. [Read More …]

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]